GE CEO Jeff Immelt Says Analytics ‘Next Holy Grail’

GE said Thursday that it is offering a slew of new industrial services and technologies that incorporate diagnostic software and data analytics, all part of what the company is calling the industrial Internet. The nine new services are designed to help airlines, railroads, hospitals, manufacturing and energy companies operate more efficiently, by analyzing data collected by networks of sensors embedded in rail cars, airplanes and other industrial environments.

“The next holy grail is about decision support and analytics,” GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt said. He introduced the products at a company event in San Francisco, where he was joined by executives from a number of customers, such as Alaska Airlines, Norfolk Southern, San Diego Gas and Electric and Mount Sinai Hospital.

GE is not the only company looking at how software analytics, Big Data and the Internet can help companies achieve operational efficiency. It’s an idea that has been discussed by others for years. Yet, the company is investing $1 billion into these and other new service offerings which are available now. Customers such as Norfolk Southern, Shell, Mount Sinai Hospital Air Asia and JHP Pharmaceuticals said they are on board.

Norfolk Southern, for example, is using software to help dispatchers and locomotive engineers make decisions that will help speed trains and save fuel. The railroad is using new analytics software from GE called RailConnect Transportation Management System and Movement Planner that gives the company real-time access to critical information so railroads can move freight faster. That information comes from a variety of sources such as the railroad’s network of sensors located on trains and tracks. It also incorporates outside information such as weather reports.

“What we’re trying to do is to take basic dispatcher decisions and automate them and leave the dispatcher to manage exceptions and to help the railroad operate more smoothly,” said Deborah Butler, executive vice president and CIO of Norfolk Southern Corp.

So far, the company has made improvements that have let trains move two-to-four miles per hour faster. An increase of one mile per hour in the speed of the Norfolk Southern network saves as much as $200 million in annual capital and operating expenses, according to the company. As the railroad company uses trains more efficiently, it will need fewer locomotives, said Butler.

The railroad is also using energy management systems that help the locomotive engineer boost fuel efficiency. The system crunches large quantities of data, everything from information about the geography and topography of the locomotive’s location to how many cars it’s pulling and potential problems along the way. “It coaches the locomotive engineer to keep the train on schedule, but to do it in a way that optimizes fuel burn, and we are seeing tremendous results here,” said Butler. In 2011, the company saw a 6.3% improvement in fuel savings, cutting its bill to about $1.6 billion. “It’s a huge savings,” she said.

Butler says that Norfolk Southern is just beginning to see a return on its investment in data systems. She says she expects productivity to increase over the next decade. “We’ll be able to provide a faster, more reliable product to our rail customers,” she said.

Comments (4 of 4)

Jeff is totally correct when he describes analytics as such. Not just numbers, mordern age analytics also cut through huge volumes of structured & unstructured text to derive insights, provide predictive models, help real-time decisions in various fields like marketing, fraud analysis & detection, healthcare, even anti-terror operations!
Think of how natural language processing running on the back of analytics engines like R, inside a hadoop framework (to handle humungous data) can tell a buyer when the seller is trying to dupe him, or automatically call the police when someone posts something which indicates suicide or any other crime, help a doctor leverage the collaborative knowledge of all medicare professionals worldwide to solve even the mildest of colds, or flag conversations that may have originated from terrorists- even decrypting them, all automatically, without any prior knowledge!
This power, if & when harnessed, will surely bring the world into a new era, where everyone contributes to everything that is affected by man, just by talking to one another!

8:20 am December 3, 2012

Ali Riaz wrote:

I couldn't agree more with Mr. Immelt's emphatic declaration on the transformative power of decision support and analytics. Analyzing data collected by networks of sensors embedded in rail cars, airplanes and other industrial environments can yield significant business value.

These sources on their own, however, still deliver an incomplete picture of what's going on in a business because they exclude the insights that are locked away in the 85% or more of enterprise information that's actually created by humans – emails, collaboration tools, documents, call center logs, open ended surveys and PDFs. In the quest to make the best possible decisions, just analyzing data without the context that this human generated information can provide still leaves operational efficiencies and money lying on the table.

8:24 am November 30, 2012

KGMani wrote:

Companies likes GE will benefit from data collected from Aircraft Engines, Wind mills etc effectively for preventive maintenance. Most of these machines degrade gracefully and the maintenance downtime can be planned for optimal efficiency. Since GE is doing the maintenance for most of its customers, profiling based on customer usage is beneficial. How do I know? Yes I am an ex GE Engineer in the know. I have gotten my hands dirty at all levels and EDI and predictive maintenance as well. Small vendors don't have access to this wonderful Big Data. Is it a monopoly..... ? Yes, by default and Jeffrey has discovered it finally. Good for him.

8:12 am November 30, 2012

Michael Segel wrote:

I wouldn't say its the 'next holy grail'.

Its important to actually understand what is possible and that sometimes the value hidden in the data is still not worth the cost and effort. Because it's the next big thing, many people are jumping on and a lot of the success stories are getting distorted.

When you clear out the hype and marketing material from some of the larger vendors, you can find a lot of success stories. One of the reasons you are now just hearing about them is that for the past couple of years, early adopters have considered their investment in to Hadoop to be IP. Even today, there are still some companies which are using Hadoop and Data Science, yet will not confirm their use.

Here in Chicago, the membership of CHUG (Chicago area Hadoop User Group) range from a wide variety of industries. (Marketing/Advertising, Healtcare, Telephony, Mapping, Travel, e-Commerce, Financial, and Insurance... just to name a few.)

Its an exciting arena and a disruptive technology in the analytics/business intelligence space.

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